Who’s next? More nude celeb pics hacked, leaked
Gabrielle Union, Meagan Good latest to have private photos stolen and posted online
Paparazzi may be a pain, but at least you can see them. Not so for the hackers stealing nude pictures of celebrities and spilling them online.
At least two actresses, Gabrielle Union and Meagan Good, have confirmed that their leaked photos, which newly appeared over the weekend and were quickly taken down, are authentic — and they’re furious.
It’s the second time in less than a month that another load of intimate photos has turned up online, targeting celebs such as Kim Kardashian, Vanessa Hudgens, Rihanna, Jenny McCarthy, Kate Bosworth, Mary-Kate Olsen, Avril Lavigne, Hayden Panettiere and others. So who’s next? The FBI, which is investigating the first round of leaks, “will mostly likely catch (the hackers), because they’re relatively easy to catch and many have already been caught,” says Philip Lieberman, CEO of Lieberman Software, which builds cyberdefense technology for governments and corporations. “There will be a perp walk, because they want to send a message.”
Union described the hackers — who stole topless photos she sent to her new husband, basketball star Dwyane Wade — as “vultures,” and called the leaks “atrocities” in a statement Saturday to TMZ.
Good posted on Instagram Sunday that she’s “definitely in shock” and “saddened.”
But, she continues, “I ‘choose’ not to give the persons responsible my power. For everyone who’s reposting the leaked nudes? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
The new pictures originally appeared on Reddit and the message-board site 4chan but were quickly removed. Reddit has banned the landing page where users shared leaked images of naked celebrities.
This latest spill comes after intimate photos of other celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Kirsten Dunst, were stolen from their personal Apple accounts and posted online.
Some of them were fake, but as many as 100 stars were targeted in the leak.
Lieberman says it’s likely that the second episode is related to the first one, and probably carried out by the same hackers.
But if hackers are so easy to catch, why do they do what they do? Because they’re “sociopaths” collecting “trophies,” Lieberman says.
“There’s a pecking order in the criminal hacker community, that the more you steal and the better the photo, the cooler you are,” he says. “These (celeb nude photos) are trophies in the community — it shows how powerful they were to get these trophies and share them around. It’s a competition.”
And there’s no better trophy than a topless celeb to this crowd. So why do the stars put their private stuff in the cloud?
“Because it’s there,” says Robert Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University. “The cloud is the new photo album. It’s become for many people the way they store their photos and they’re not thinking that this might not be secure.
“But if they’ve not learned this lesson yet, they’re taking an awful long time to learn it,” Thompson says.
So what should they — and all the rest of us — do?
Lieberman says the solution is simple but inconvenient: better passwords. “You have to have a complex password that is hard to guess, and then don’t share it.”